


Sugared Violets and Broken China

by Amand_r



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-21
Updated: 2011-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:28:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You hate Harry Potter.  This isn't his fault that you hate him; it's his mother's fault, your sister's.  All that hate has been transferred from her dead body (because it isn't right to speak ill of the dead) to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sugared Violets and Broken China

You hate Harry Potter. This isn't his fault that you hate him; it's his mother's fault, your sister's. All that hate has been transferred from her dead body (because it isn't right to speak ill of the dead) to him. You admit that if Lily had remained the little sister who was normal, you might have liked Harry, because he is quiet and shy and rather charming, well, except for that hair and the scar.

You are wiping down the kitchen again, even though you made Harry do it earlier. You could have made him do the dishes as well, but instead you let them soak in the sink. You are thinking of something that happened a long time ago.

 _…The birthday cake is chocolate. Chocolate in and outside. The letters that your mother dithered over with a paper pastry bag stand out on the top, latticed green "Happy Birthday Petunia!" with little petunias, real and icing constructed, sprinkled on the top. You are thirteen, and you are clutching the edges of the table in preparation for the blowing out of the candles. Lily is at the opposite end of the table, sitting in your father's lap. Your cousins and aunts and uncles are all there to sing to you, your friends are there holding snap dragons and champagne poppers, ready to pull on the strings and let loose a volley of confetti and streamers upon you. You make a wish._

 _The candles waver, and you pause because your breath is still in your lungs. Then the table itself begins to rumble, tilting precariously this way and that. You can feel it shake under your fingers. You dare to glance at Lily, because you know she's doing this, and before you can ever bother the cake flies upward and into the air, spinning lazy circles. Flowers sprinkle from the top of the cake to fall into the grass._

 _"Now, now, Lily," your mother whispers, and you can see from her face that she's slightly alarmed. Accidents like this have happened since Lily was five. You stare at her, her eyes wide, her face red and shocked, as if she can't control it. Everyone is staring: all your friends, your aunt Mildred, your cousins, everyone._

 _You are mortified._

 _The cake ascends higher and higher in the air, tipping this way and that, before upending on its plate and crashing back down to the table. Chocolate icing spatters all over you, flying into your eyes and chest._

 _"Lily!" Your father says admonishingly. You have no words. Your friends from school are trying to pretend as if they aren't present, and your family is trying to salvage any of the cake._

 _When you manage finally to see Lily from your seat, she looks shocked, as if she is confused as to what just happened. But you know what happened, and she does too. In fact, everyone here does._

 _Harry'd had that same look when he was little, that look of not understanding why strange things happened around him. Like the snake at the zoo. Unlike Lily, he had no idea what he was doing. Lily knew. She knew that she made all kinds of_ things _happen, and your parents encouraged her._

 _"Oh Lily, you_ must _learn to behave! Apologize to your sister!"_

 _You don't wait for the apology that comes. Instead, you push back your chair, stand with as much dignity one who is covered in chocolate birthday cake can muster, and walk away from everyone, up to your room, where you change and lie down to go to sleep.  
_

You push the memory away at that. It's too much to think of, you know, especially when you think to compare tonight's "event" to your birthday party. When you think to compare yourself and your sister with confectionery creations.

Lily is the pudding, with its sugared violets, spoiled by magic. She was sweet and special and pretty, everyone had said so. You had been special too, you know. As the elder sister you had bestowed upon yourself the responsibility to nurture her. How many nights had she slept in your bed with you while storms raged outside? How many times had she come crying to you when bullies teased her at school, pulling and mocking her red hair?

You had been her hero. You had been your mummy's "good Petunia", your father's "little rosebud." And while they had loved Lily too, you had always thought that they had held you in a cherished position as the first child.

But then the magic had come with that first Hogwarts letter, and you knew deep in your soul by the way that your parents' faces had lit up at the mere mention of Lily off at school, that you'd never be the special one again. You are the vanilla ice cream that you had had to make do with after the pudding had been decimated.

What no one, not even your dead parents, will ever know is that Lily died because of her stupid witchy ways. You both had woken up in the middle of the night, you and Vernon, and you had grabbed his robe, whispering, "Vernie, go see what it is." And he had gone and there at the door had been Harry, his little scar red and irritated. You hadn't much of a chance to think about it because just minutes after Vernon had carried the boy in Dudley had started crying for his three o' clock feeding. You had gotten the milk out of the Frigidaire and then it had hit you that if Harry was here then your sister was dead.

Even at the moment that this had hit you, it was still rather unclear what it all meant, until you had had several days to figure it out. Harry's face, you see, is a sweet one, like your sister's. Harry's eyes are that brilliant green like your sister's. But he favors his father so much it almost swallows up the Lily in him.

Then you realized, as you sat in the rocker in Duddy's room, feeding them both simultaneously in your arms, Dudley on your breast, Harry from a bottle, that there was barely anything left of her that you could touch. Nothing you could claim as a keepsake of the sister _you_ knew, the one who had come into your room after the cake disaster, her eyes red and teary:

 _"Pet?" Sniffles in the dark. A sliver of light from the hallway. "Pet?"_

 _You roll over to see her, thinking that you still don't forgive her for doing what she did for whatever reason, though you know that it was probably an accident._

 _But her little hands hold out one of your mother's Wedgewood plates –the good white china ones—and you see that she has managed to cobble a large slice of cake together in the semblance of a wedge. She had smoothed a great deal of chocolate icing over it, and has littered the top and sides of it with half-wilted petunias and fractured sugar flower petals._

 _You think of all of the things you are going to have to say to your friends when you go back to school on Monday. You think of all the excuses you will give, and the fear in their eyes as you know they don't believe you. You even think of the chocolate stained dress –a gift from your grandmother—that is downstairs on the laundry room drying, its white lace pinafore forever ruined._

 _But you take the plate anyway._

This is the crux, you understand, as you wash your inherited white china in the sink (perhaps this very plate in your hands is the one from that night). From that first night with _the boy_ you have known that there is nothing left but your lingering fear that Harry has all of the traits that you had hated in your sister, and none of the ones that you had loved, for you had loved her.

You had loved her firstly because she was your sister, but also for her laugh, which was always a bit frantic and loose, as if it didn't care about anything. You had loved the way she could plait her hair into two french braids. You had loved that light in her eyes when she watched you get ready for dates, peppering you with questions, her eyes sparkling with innocence.

No need to bother with the other memory, the day she came home from her sixth year, and she'd discovered Potter, and her eyes didn't shine with that innocence any longer (and you knew, you just _knew_ , oh.)

You flash on an image that you carry with yourself though long ago you destroyed the photograph:

 _You open the envelope though you know it is from her. The paper inside is stiff, and in fact it isn't paper at all, but a photograph. You look at the back first, and read in your sister's bubbly cursive. 'Pet! So sad that you couldn't be here. James and I missed you very much! Next summer! Majorca! Love, Lils.'_

 _When you had turned over the photo, you stared at the moving pictures, not sure whether to be pleased or livid. Lily is in all white, her hair piled with flowers. It seems that she is trying to smash cake into the face of a young man, but he's not being very cooperative. The man whom you know is called James Potter eludes Lily's hands, holding both of them in his own for a moment before he lets them go. Finally, Lily manages to smear cake on his face, right across the mouth, as several other people look on and laugh. The he grabs her mouth for a kiss, and Lily's hands go wilted at her sides._

 _This is not the first moving picture you have gotten, but it is the one that hurts the most. You burn it immediately before Vernon can see it._

 _But you notice that the flowers in Lily's hair were almost all petunias._

"Aunt Petunia?" You turn, losing the grip on the plate you are holding, and letting it crash to the floor. There isn't even time to see it fall, really. You simply stare at it on the floor, splintered shards and large chunks of white soapy china. Harry backpedals toward the stairs, but you shake your head.

"I'm sorry, Aunt Petunia," he mutters, but you are still looking at the plate, thinking that perhaps you just destroyed the last evidence of her in your life, just like how you burned all her pictures.

"I'll go get the dustpan then," he finishes, but you tear your gaze away from the plate finally, long enough to realize that in the semi darkness of the ill-lit kitchen, all you can really see of him are his silhouette and his eyes, Lily's green eyes.

It's enough to cause fright, and enough to make you realize what you had started out thinking earlier this evening: that you hate Harry Potter.

You hate Harry Potter. This isn't his fault that you hate him, it's his mother's fault, your sister's. All that hate has been transferred from her dead body (because it isn't right to speak ill of the dead) to him. You admit that if Lily had remained the little sister who was normal, you might have liked Harry, because he is quiet and shy and rather charming, well, except for that hair and the scar.

You think of all of the things that sisters do, after the fighting over the bathroom and the squealing over boys is gone: baby pictures and shopping, and gossip about ineffectual husbands. You and Lily might have nattered away at each other in your kitchens, cradling the phone in the nook of your shoulder while washing dishes with rubber gloves. You think of summers at the beach, where your two families might have come together for a house in Majorca, and Lily and you would have watched your boys bake golden in the sun as you lounged in chairs in the sand.

You imagine that if Lily was still alive, even if she was a witch, Vernon would be in a better mood because Harry wouldn't be there, Harry, whose very presence seems to make Vernon's left eye twitch. Vernon might look kinder on her, Petunia thinks, even if she is the only one who notices that he started to refuse her advances shortly after the boy had arrived.

When Harry returns with the broom and dustpan, you take them from his hands. "Go to bed," you say softly, not really knowing why, but perhaps starting to understand how your mother must have felt on certain days when the books couldn't stay on the shelves and the telly turned on and off even when no one was in the room. It doesn't please you to say this to him, you _should_ make him clean it up –Vernon most certainly would- but his eyes unnerve you, and you know that the last thing you want is him touching Lily's plate.

Though it may not even be the plate.

Most of the pieces are large and you pick them up with your hands and place them in your apron front. The rest you sweep into the dustpan. The water is running in the sink, blessed white noise so that you can't hear the crickets outside, or Vernon's nasal snore from the lounge. You glance under the table before you stand, and your eye catches something obscured by the leg closest to the stove: a sugared violet.

It's leftover, and Harry must have missed it. You lean forward and pick it up, holding it to the light. There is something delicate about it, even though it survived the fall intact. It survived the fall, and the clean up, and you found it because of Lily's plate.

Shaking you head, you know that it's neither here nor there. Lily is not a sugared violet, nor is she a plate. She's a woman (a mother, a sister, a lover, a witch) who has long been dead, taking with her something that made you magical, though you never knew it at the time and wouldn't have wanted it even if you had known.

You're tired. You dump the plate in the trash and give the violet a final look before dropping it in as well. Then you finish the dishes, wipe up the spilled water and take out the trash.

That's all it is, after all, simply trash.

END


End file.
